


Bill's Joyeux Noel

by Brazendale



Category: True Blood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 10:12:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5493482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brazendale/pseuds/Brazendale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In honour of the 100 year centenary of the war to end all wars, this is a short <br/>Christmas tale where Bill reminisces about a Christmas Eve he will never forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bill's Joyeux Noel

‘Bill?’ ‘Hmm…’ he responded. ‘Bill what was it like at Christmas time during the war?’ Jessica asked as they sat in front of his fireplace on Christmas Eve, the parlour decked out in festive trimmings, a tree resplendently lit with twinkling lights in the corner of the room with presents nestled neatly wrapped and decorated beneath it. She was so happy that despite other vampires shunning the human traditions of the season, Bill held on to the magic of Christmas and agreed with her passion for all things celebratory. ‘Which war?’ he responded, absent mindedly continuing to read a book he was engrossed in.

Jessica’s eyes opened wide. ‘What do you mean which war? You mean you were in more than one war?’ she asked incredulously. Her words finally sunk in and he patiently shut his book and turned to her knowing that he would get no peace until he had explained himself. ‘Sadly I have been in more than one war but only one war as a human, several as a … vampire though,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Bill tell me about it,’ she urged him, ‘unless you prefer not to talk about it,’ she added considerately. She had a sudden pang of guilt at her enthusiasm for times that may bring up painful memories for him. More than anyone else she knew what it was like to be torn between her vampirism and the fight to retain human qualities and values for she felt the same way. That was one of the many reasons she loved him so much.

He looked at her and saw the dilemma she was in, wanting to know but fearing that her question may cause him pain at dragging up unwanted memories. He smiled and patted her face, understanding her curiosity; she was so very young he thought to himself. Then he began to talk.

‘It was 1917 and the war in Europe had dragged on for many weary years,’ Bill began, his voice soft with reminisces for that far off time in the past…. ‘I had been in Paris on business for Lorena. As usual I was at her beck and call and she had sent me over there from England where we had been living for some time. She trusted me as her financial advisor,’ he confided, ‘as I had made her quite a lot of money over the years and opened up her life to the finer things in property investment and lately in art. ‘Then the war broke out and I was trapped.’

Bill went on with his story as Jessica sat listening to him enthralled by yet another piece of the puzzle that was her beloved Bill.

‘You have to remember times were so very different for us back then. Travelling was hazardous at the best of times and without money, lots of money, the risk of getting caught out was very high. Because of the war shipping was highly restricted so there I was in Paris without any means of getting back to England that did not entail a higher risk than I was prepared to take.

As the years dragged on so many of the human contacts that had afforded me protection were lost in the patriotic fervour of enlisting only to become fodder for the war machine, and with the curfews that were in issue, even getting around the city to feed at night became intolerable so by 1917 I had become desperate. Then it occurred to me, where ever there were armies there were the suffering and dying. From my own human experience of war I knew only too well what torment those lying out in no man’s land went through waiting for either help or death to reach them or take them, whichever the case may be. So after reading of one particularly egregious slaughterhouse of a battle I …. I decided to leave the city and headed for the battle grounds.’

He hesitated, reflecting on his decision that at the time was a necessity under the circumstances but one that even now still did not sit well with his morality. At the time he had justified it as being an end to a means. If he could help a soldier to ease into death painlessly and end their suffering whilst at the same time finding sustenance then surely there was some justification in his actions other than the depravity of his race. He had to believe that or he simply could not go on he told himself over and over at the time.

‘So it was that I found myself in a little place near the front and the scene of the stalemate that had pitted one army against another and wasted an entire generation of mankind’s youth. Being a history lover I knew of a church in the village and even though it was in ruins from the continual bombardment that pounded the place, I knew that underneath the ancient place of worship there would be a hidden vault, a crypt or mausoleum for those devote preachers belonging to the church and  so it was there that I spent my days, unconcerned that my hiding place would be discovered as I had been careful to do my own part in the demolition of any remaining remnants that may lead to discovery. I had a safe place to go to ground and found that there were more than enough wounded and dying to sustain me.  

The months dragged pitifully on as the year wore down towards the coming of yet another year and the fighting went on, the French and the allies winning hard fought ground only to lose it once again and on and on it went. The suffering was appalling but then in war it always is. At night I would leave my underground sanctuary when it was safe enough to do so and search the fields looking for any poor unfortunates that the medics hadn’t been able to get to during the fighting or those who had been left behind in the heat of the moment by their comrades under the impression that there was nothing more that could be done for them. Then there were those that were stranded in no man’s land between the two opposing trenches that neither side could take the chance of risking yet more of their troops to send out to rescue in the often futile effort of retrieval.

Those were the ones that I sought out first. The ones that all hope had abandoned and were beyond hope of any help, a slow and excruciating death was the only future they had,’ he said somewhat bitterly, an underlying memory of something deeply affecting his emotions running through his pain racked voice. ‘You could hear them groaning and whimpering pitifully in the lulls between the fighting, screaming that would tear through your heart with its horror or crying that would leave you any man with a heart sick to the stomach. That’s what would lead me to them; the crying and the pathetic noises of the dying were like a beacon for me.

I would like to kid myself that I was being a humanitarian and that by ending the suffering of those that had no hope I was committing a noble deed. I have to think that, even now I still have to believe that. I once read that there is no greater gift you can give another person than to ease them out of this life when their end comes. I can understand that sentiment. To take the pain and suffering away from those that had no hope, those that were torn apart by shot and metal and man’s inhumanity to man … surely then I was a welcome relief from the endless suffering?’

He sighed and shook his head. To Jessica it was obvious that this was something that Bill had long debated with himself and she was regretting bitterly that she had ever bought up the subject. She took his hand and gave it a small squeeze. He looked and her and gave a small smile.

‘Then something happened that changed everything and that made me see that perhaps I was wrong to doubt myself. It was Christmas Eve and when I emerged at dusk I could see that the fighting had been ferocious during the day and had been for the last few days, so fierce in fact that I had stayed gone to ground for three days and I was ravenous. I needed to feed and I needed to feed badly.

The roads, if you could call them that for they were really just well-worn tracks through the quagmire of mud and slush bordering the fields of carnage, that night I could see they were even more torn up by the stream of ambulances that must have made their along them during the day than normal and besides, I could smell the blood. There was so much blood and the landscape looked different. There were more craters scattered around from the shelling so that in the moonlight it looked like a bizarre surreal abstract painting of some foreign as yet discovered moon. Death was everywhere that night; I could see it and smell it.

It had been snowing too and quite a bit of it for a few days by the look of it. The air was bitterly cold just adding to the suffering of those that were out in it at its mercy but there was no one around; it was very quiet when I crept out into the space between the two opposing trenches, both sides must have been totally spent by the long hours of wearisome battle so I was able to make my way with ease. I scrambled up the side of a bomb crater, the smell of blood pulling me towards it and peered over the edge. I could see someone lying to one side at the bottom, a pale face turned up to the moonlight flitting in between breaks in the snow laden clouds. I knew that he was still alive because I could hear him breathing. Moving quickly I was at his side before he saw me coming and had time to reach for his weapon.        

‘G’day mate, I’ve been expecting you,’ the young soldier, with much struggling, managed to drag himself up a little so that he was sitting leaning somewhat awkwardly against a huge chunk of blasted rock as a back rest. I scanned over his body; taking in the bloody and mangled tattered remnant of his leg and the blackened frost bitten finger on the youth’s right hand from where he had lain in the snow. Although the boy’s accent was strange I knew it to be Australian as I had heard others in the night over the last few months.

I eased myself closer to the lad and asked with some curiosity, ‘You have been expecting me? How is that?’ I asked him softly. ‘Well mate it’s like this,’ the soldier explained, ‘when they ordered us to set up our machine gun post on this bit of a hill, to cover those bloody newfangled tanks that some nit wit had come up with, I didn’t give us much of a chance. Machine gunners are always the first target and you get used to that but the tanks were another prospect. They are so slow that our blokes following on behind could have walked faster than the bloody things. They were cannon fodder and we had Buckley’s hope of protecting them especially when they started the shelling.’

He paused for breath, his breathing was ragged despite the stoic front he was putting up, I could see the pain the boy was in and felt for him.

‘We took out a few of them before being hit fair and square just feet away. Dave took a chunk to the guts and was killed outright poor bastard but Harry and Percy, Len and Bluey were hit with shrapnel and I took bullets to the leg. That was five days ago,’ he added with some thought, counting up the long agony filled nightmarish hours he had been lying there.

I was confused. Where were the others, this boy’s mates, I thought to myself. Why were there no signs of any of his companions and how could anyone have survived out here in the snow with the injuries this lad exhibited?

The young man must have noticed my bewilderment and gave a sardonic chuckle. ‘Bet you are wondering where me mates are, aren’t you?’ I nodded. ‘Well after a couple of days the stretcher bearers managed to get out to us and have a squiz. I knew that the others were in pretty bad shape, Harry had stopped talking after the first night and Bluey, well he was nearly off his rocker with the pain so when the medics showed up and they only had four stretchers I told them to take the others, they were worse off than me. I mean to say, they were me mates and mates look after each other don’t they?’ he asked me as if it was the most important question in the world.

‘Yes,’ I told him thinking back to battles I had been in during the civil war, ‘you do look after your mates,’ I told him using the young man’s parlance. ‘Besides,’ the soldier went on, ‘they promised they would come back for me as soon as they could but,’ he shrugged, ‘the fighting’s been too thick for anyone to get out  here and there’s no guarantee they made it back safely anyway so I figured that I can’t really make it much longer. I know that I haven’t got long that’s why I was expecting you. You are here to take me away aren’t you? You are death aren’t you mate?’

I was taken aback. In all my time out there amongst the wounded I’d never gotten into a conversation with any of the men I’d had come across. The men were generally so close to death that ending their suffering had seemed imperative but this lad, he had a spirit, a determination that was obvious just by the fact that he had survived so long in the circumstances he was in.  

‘Do you want to die?’ I asked, curiosity getting the better of me now. Or perhaps it was something in me that bought back my own war time experiences and the need to talk to another human being who understood. He was a fellow soldier and had something very basic in common with my own familiarity of the turmoil of emotions you go through fighting in a conflict and witnessing the abject horrors of what man can do to another man all in the name of glory and futile causes. I had never had the chance to talk through my own involvement with war after it ended … I was turned on my way home and so somewhere deep down inside I guess something stirred in me. Call it a the desire to talk through the scars that had never had time to heal if you will but whatever it was, I felt a bond with this youth that had come half way around the world on the adventure of a life time only to have his life torn to pieces from him in foreign mud soaked field.

Had it been today and I had been human I would have had the advantage of counselling, perhaps even been diagnosed with PTSD, joined a veterans group and shared my encounters and horrors with others of a similar background, and I would have been able to work through the pain of the nightmarish memories that haunted my dreams and produced flashbacks that left me cold, sweating and at times nauseous. Odd that with all that I had seen and done as a vampire I could still feel those very human emotions when thinking of war but that remaining spark of humanity within me had never let go of the trauma I had gone through when seeing childhood friends ripped apart by a mini ball or blown to pieces by a cannon shell. Nor had the charnel stink of dead rotting flesh left to bake in the fields of the hot Southern sun ever left my nostrils. These were the things that still permeated my being and had been left unspoken of for years and now I was empathising with this shattered young boy from a distant land and reliving my own horrors. It touched a part of my soul and kindled a spark of the companionable spirit of comradery within me that had lain dormant since my turning.

‘Mate,’ he gave me a pain wracked grin and went on again, ‘we all have to die sometime. I … I got a letter on the morning before we were ordered to the front,’ his voice cracked a little as he spoke, ‘telling me that my mother had passed on while I was on the march to wherever it is that we are right now. My dearest mother,’ tears glistened in his face as he looked at Bill and shrugged. ‘So you see it doesn’t really matter how you die, we are all going to face it sooner or later when it is our time to go. I would have liked to make it home though, I am worried about papa, I am the oldest of fourteen and without me as the bread winner, and no one there to lend a hand… well I just worry how he’ll manage.’

There was not a sound anywhere around as the boy regaled  his story to me then suddenly out of absolutely nowhere, in the distance I heard the most surreal thing, a voice singing. Carrying its way across the muddied charnel blood soaked ground of no man’s land; it rang out clearly in the still night air. It was so unreal and ethereal that for a moment we both stopped and listened. The first line of a Christmas carol wafted in the stilled night air of that deathly battle ground then, another voice joined in the singing but this time it was from across the land, in the opposite direction. Soon another and yet another joined in and before the second verse of the ancient rhyme it seemed like we were surrounded by the holy music of the Christmas night.

‘Is it angels do you think? Are they angels?’ the young boy asked. I shook my head and left his side for a moment to cautiously make my way to the edge of the crater. Peering over the top I searched through the night for any stirring of life and saw a scene that even to this day, I will never forget. There in the distance I saw men climbing out of the trenches and walking into no man’s land, still singing, and then embracing their enemy. Their voices now melding into one as the spirit of Christmas, and that of humanity, overwhelmed all those that were present there. The fighting forgotten for one brief space in time, their opposing ideologies cast aside for something more powerful and more basic than the futility of a war that none of those young men there really understood nor wanted. They were all brothers in arms on that Christmas night and all shared the same needs and wants. They all missed their loved ones and wanted only one thing, a bond they all had in common and that could be understood in any man’s language; they wanted the war to end and they wanted to go home to the comfort of those they loved and loved them just as dearly.    

I slid back down to where the boy laid, his face still pale but with an exultant expression written all over it now. ‘If I have to go then this is how I would chose, with the voice of angels beside me,’ he said simply.

Bill’s voice trailed off to a halt, a bloody tear escaping down his face as he re-encountered the story to Jess. ‘What happened Bill, what happened to the boy?’ she asked.

Suddenly looked at her and smiled. He’d been so engrossed in the memory he had hardly realised her presence there with him but at her question he began to speak again.

‘He was fading fast by now, the injuries to him had taken their toll and it was so very cold, his breathe barely visible as he weakened further from the loss of blood and shock that would have killed anyone else not as hardy as the young lad had been. There wasn’t much time left. I knew it and he knew it too. I… I wanted him to make it. There was something special about him and special about the night too, and the circumstances. Maybe it was because it was Christmas or perhaps it was that streak of humanism in me that wanted so very much for him to make it home, to help his papa and his family. I don’t know, but as I sat beside him thinking out what would be the best way I could help him, fate took a different turn.

As I said, the fighting had stopped and the soldiers were all mingling. They must have declared a truce of sorts to allow them to look for their wounded and perhaps bury their dead which meant that men began to wander around searching for missing comrades. Before I had taken any action, from the other side of the crater I heard a voice. ‘Hans, Hans wo bist do – where are you?’ it asked again but in English, this time calling out a little louder. A young man no older than nineteen or twenty, beautiful to look at with his shock of blonde hair and startling blue eyes, scrambled down the side of the rubble then came to a dead stand still when he looked over and saw me.

Afraid that he was about to scream I was on him in a flash and then …’ Bill hung his head as he admitted, ‘hunger over took me and I fed, stopping in time to save him from myself mind you’. I glamoured him quickly, suggesting that he get some help for my Australian boy and then I made my way back to my hide away as by that time the whole of the area was swarming with soldiers. They were singing and sharing what meagre rations both sides had, searching around for their lost companions and sadly, burying their dead. I even saw in impromptu football game between the two sides break out. It was quite a sight really and something that I will never forget for as long as I exist.’ 

Bill fell silent as he thought back through the years to the long ago magical Christmas in worn torn France where the true spirit of Christmas halted an inglorious event that tore through the whole world and changed the course of history and millions of lives there with it.

‘Did you ever find out what happened to the Australian boy?’ Jessica asked, almost afraid to hear something bad but hoping that he had made it and somehow found his way back to his family.

Bill reached across and picked up his laptop from where he had left it on the coffee table in front of them, then with vampire speed he typed in a name and searched his folders until he found the one that he was looking for.

Opening the file an archival document sprang into life. It read: 

Extract from Wounded and Missing report

Missing In reference to Pte X X XXXXXXXX Eye witness reports from battalion members - 

The last time he was seen alive and well was in a German trench but since the retirement no one seems to know anything further about him.

There were a good few of our boys taken prisoner but nothing has been confirmed.  

Another document read –I saw him lying dead, hit by a shell. We had to evacuate. He was a jolly type of fellow and a mate.

And yet another account – He was hit by a shell, we left him for dead. 

Jessica scrolled through the documents until she looked up at Bill and smiled after reading: 

Captured by the Germans, leg amputated at the hip. 

Repatriated to England under a prisoner of war exchange in June 1918 

Left for Australia.  Died April of 1959 – surviving family: three children, five grandchildren, numerous great grandchildren and great great grandchildren living in Australia to this day.  

‘He made it home,’ she smiled, bloody tears glistening in her eyes. ‘Yes,’ Bill smiled back.

‘If it hadn’t been for you he wouldn’t have and all those,’ she pointed to the words on the page telling of the generations that succeeded the young soldier, ‘would not have existed if it hadn’t been for you,’ she repeated.  

But Bill shook his head saying, ‘No, not because of me, it was not me that saved him. It was the comradery and love of man for man, and the spirit of one young soldier and his love for his fellow mates and family, that was what  saved him and… ,’ he paused reflecting before going on, ‘after all, it was Christmas.’ 

‘Merry Christmas Jess,’ he hugged her as the clock struck twelve, ‘and merry Christmas to all those who still believe in the magic that Christmas brings.’

**Author's Note:**

> Parts of this tale is based on fact, dates and names have been changed for the sake of the story line. 
> 
> On Christmas Eve of 1914 soldiers of both sides engaged in fighting on the front line in France laid down their guns in a gesture of companionship and fraternised in a touching moment of human kind’s triumph over the horror and adversity they were enduring. This has been, in part, an inspiration for this story. 
> 
> The story of the Australian soldier in this tale is loosely based on a true account with minor changes for the sake of the story line. His descendants live on to this day, I am fortunate to say that I happen to be one of them.


End file.
